Donald Trump will be inaugurated as the nation’s 44th president on Friday amid allegations that the Russians sought to influence election by hacking e-mails from an operative of the Democratic Party.

Trump’s expressed admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin and his public rejection of intelligence reports implicating the Russians in the election hacking, among other events, have raised questions about Trump’s future stance toward Russia –­­­ even from Trump’s fellow Republicans.

Jeffrey Rossman, an associate professor in the University of Virginia’s Corcoran Department of History, specializes in the history of Russia and the Soviet Union. He is the author of “Worker Resistance Under Stalin: Class and Revolution on the Shop Floor,”and he received a Collaborative Research Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies for his work with Lynne A. Viola, a professor at the University of Toronto, on reframing the history of Soviet mass violence in the 1930s and ’40s. Rossman currently teaches course on the history of Russia since 1917.

Associate Professor Jeffrey Rossman

We recently sat down with Rossman, who has been teaching at UVA since 1999, to discuss the United States’ current relations with Russia and how things could be different as a new administration takes office.